Riot Games’ massively popular first person shooter, Valorant is quite the success story, managing to amass a massive playerbase and quickly growing to become one of the best competitive FPS games available to this day.
The game is interestingly enough, solely focused around its 5v5 PvP multiplayer, with Riot not having expressed an interest toward making a separate, single player campaign for the game thus far.
This is inspite of the game having a ton of background, lore and characters. However, this might not be such a bad thing, and a focus on multiplayer might be in Riot’s best interests.
Story modes aren’t alien to multiplayer focused games at all. For example, Rainbow Six Siege – despite its focus on co-op multiplayer does feature a small, but concise and fun single player mode. The same can be said for Titanfall 2, which arguably has one of the best FPS campaigns in recent memory, regardless of its short run time.
Riot Games could easily make a dedicated Valorant single player mode, and there is definitely enough material to cover it. The world of Valorant is diverse, and filled with rich lore that can complement its gameplay.
It doesn’t have to be in-depth either, and even a simple, one-off campaign would most certainly satisfy fans. After all, fans have been clamoring for a single-player mode since the game’s inception, and this would be a good way for Riot to earn player trust, bringing in potentially more players in the process.
A surefire way to make this work would be to release a small campaign, and then have seasonal updates carry over in the form of episodic content. Each major update would bring with it an hour or so of single-player maps and progression – which is not unlike the strategy employed by certain live service tiles such as Genshin Impact and Wuthering Waves.
Separating the single-player mode from multiplayer would be a better course of action in this case however – given that the multiplayer aspect is infinitely more popular, and shoehorning a concept to the player rarely works out.
Making a decent single player campaign is no easy task. It requires a ton of dev team resources, and even more planning to execute. Most importantly, it is something entirely new to the developers, and chances of successfully molding a likable campaign do appear to be quite low.
Riot simply will not consider a single player mode as a priority – because it is not a worthwhile, long-term investment. Sure, a campaign would draw in a certain amount of buzz and potential new players, but at the end of the day, Valorant is a multiplayer focused title.
Spending development costs on a niche game mode will likely never be a priority, and the time and effort spent in making such a mode could be spent better off on game balancing, patching and general progression instead.
Additionally, Valorant’s transition to Unreal Engine 5 might make trivial matters such as a campaign all the more skippable for Riot, given the massive manpower required to do the same.
At the very least, Riot could consider making a motion series and/or animated TV mini series to complement its lore. Arcane managed to do it, and Valorant has enough material and creative liberty to do the same with great success too.
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